Mozilla launches A-Frame WebVR framework

Mozilla's virtual reality development team has announced the official launch of A-Frame, an open-source framework designed to make it easy for web developers to produce VR content.

Mozilla was the first browser maker to dip its toes into the burgeoning virtual reality market when engineer Vladimir Vukićević released a prototype build of Firefox with virtual reality support back in June 2014. This experiment resulted in the launch of MozVR, a platform for demonstrating the technology and sharing virtual reality projects playable within Firefox. Now, the project has gone a step further with the launch of A-Frame.

Designed for the Oculus Rift headset, produced by Facebook-owned Oculus VR and due for a commercial launch some time next year, A-Frame offers a means for web developers to quickly create virtual reality content using familiar markup language. 'We created A-Frame to make it easier to create VR web experiences,' the team explained in the launch announcement this week. 'WebVR has shipped in builds of Firefox and Chromium since the summer of 2014, but creating content for it has required knowing WebGL. The WebGL scene is unbelievably talented and has created many mind-blowing VR experiences in the last year, but they are a small subset of the full web dev community. There are millions of talented developers who do not know WebGL. What if each of them could create and share VR experiences on the open web?'

The A-Frame technology is designed to be cross-platform, working on desktop and mobile hardware - though its developers are currently having trouble with the Android build. A guide to getting started with the framework is available from the official website.